Telkom 'not to blame' for pigeon firm's slow broadband

Telkom says it cannot be blamed for slow broadband services at a Durban-based company which claims a pigeon can carry its data bundles faster.

“Telkom would like to clarify that the company cannot be blamed for this particular customer’s lack of throughput speeds,” Troy Hector, executive of business sales and ICT business solutions, told Sapa in an email on Thursday.

“Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted. It must also be noted that Telkom is not the customer’s core service provider,” said Hector.

The Unlimited company, which operates call centres, on Wednesday sent a pigeon with a four gigabyte data card strapped to his legs from Howick to Hillcrest in Durban.

At the same time, it started transmitting a four gigabyte file via ADSL.

In total it took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds for Winston the pigeon to fly to Hillcrest and to upload the data from the card on to the call centre system.

By that time, the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete.

The Unlimited IT head Kevin Rolfe said Telkom phoned him a few days ago to say that if he experienced any problems with its lines, he should log a complaint with the Telkom call centre.

“When there is a [major] problem we do it, but the problems are so ongoing that you will end up continuously logging faults,” said Rolfe.—Sapa